Oncology

Imaging Industry Seeks More Coverage for Cancer Scans

The medical imaging industry in the US, called for the Medicare Government health plan to broaden its coverage of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans to additional cancer types, asking an advisory panel to recommend wider payments. Representatives of the Academy of Molecular Imaging and other groups said that data collected from a nationwide patient registry showed scans helped doctors adjust their treatment plans for roughly one-third of enrolled patients.

The groups, which also include several medical societies, initially had asked Medicare to lift restrictions on payments for nine cancers: brain, cervical, bladder, small-cell lung, ovarian, testicular, prostate, kidney and pancreatic cancers. Medicare, which covers 44 million elderly and disabled Americans, said in 2005 it would cover the nine cancers if patients were enrolled in the registry. In March, the groups said they had enough information to support easing the policy by allowing routine coverage without registration. The government agency is seeking advice from outside medical advisers before deciding whether to broaden payments or otherwise change the current program. Eliminating the patient registration requirement would allow greater use of PET among Medicare patients, in part because it would be easier for doctors to order the scans. That could be a boost for PET scan makers such as General Electric Co, Siemens AG and Philips Electronics NV. Almost two million PET scans are given in the United States each year. There has been disagreement over the effectiveness of PET scans compared to other imaging techniques such as Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans in detecting cancer cells. With PET, patients are injected with radioactive sugars that collect in metabolically active parts of the body, which could signal growth and possibly cancer.

Reuters